Metcard Machines and Tickets

[cmgord@ecr.mu.oz.au (Christopher_Martin GORDON)]

The following are some of the policies about Metcard tickets and
interesting points about Metcard in general:

The large machines on the stations (TVM2) have two ticket slots,
the design is for the left ticket slot to dispense the current
paper metcards for all Short Trip (rail+2), 2-hour, daily, off
peak and 60+.  The slot of the right was to dispense plastic
coated Metcards (like Sydney) for all Weekly, Monthly and
10X2-hour.  The decision was made by the Government that all
metcards had to be biodegradable, so the second slot on the large
machines was changed to become a back-up ticket dispenser. 

Metcard Xpress was originally designed for high volume users, like
people that use monthlies and yearlies.  The large machines have
the top-up facility for these tickets.  The decision was made by
the government that these tickets would be available for disabled
people only, and only for a period of 1 year (then needs to be
renewed).  

So it looks like if the people in Melbourne want plastic coated
metcards, or metcard xpress they better start telling the
government.  

I have learnt a little more about the ticket machines and
validators as well, common problems now are people putting 5 cent
pieces into the validators and this stuffs the thermal print
heads.  People jamming the coin slots on the machines, and
clamming later when caught without tickets that the ticket
machine was out of order (which it was and has been logged).
All problems the machines have with the exception of jammed coin
slots (paper in the top) are automatically reported back to a
central computer and there is a policy of fixing these problems
with in 1 hour.  The machines have many different silent alarms,
movement (if you kick the machine), opening the machine (requires
pin by operator) and many others.

The problems of the acid in the machines started when one of the
machines caught fire, the fire brigade put the fire out using an
acidic fire extinguisher, and then money started to pour out of
the machine.  A few days later the attacks of the machines started
at Mooroolbark, people were getting money out, at first it was
just buckets of mild acid thrown at the machine, later it was the
squeeze bottles.  Then people turned to strong acids and the
machines were starting to get damaged, at the peak there were
95% of the machines out of service.  There have been modifications
since to limit damage to the machines in this way.

The computer boards in the machines have 8080 processors which is
the reason they are so slow, that is a prototype board and they
haven't got around to replacing them yet.  (Sydney has 80486
processors, if fact just a 486 computer in the machines for the
ferries)

There are a few other design problems of the machines some of
which can lead to interesting effect, but these are better left
off out of a newsgroup posting.

(I hate to say this and I am disappointed) Melbourne has the
highest rate of vandalism to automatic ticket machines.  It is
much higher than Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, and any other city
in the world.  (Maybe it comes from the attitude of the
Government, people like Kennett throwing sand in reporter's
faces and getting away with it, who knows)



--

Chris Gordon
http://www.ecr.mu.oz.au/~cmgord

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